Swingin' on a Star

For the first time in months, I felt human. Every week got better and better. I began to feel as if my life had a purpose. I began to live for my weekends. Unfortunately, I also began to get a reputation. Some of the men at work began to hit on me. I guess a couple of the women had looser lips than I had thought.

I realized then that I had to get things under control and be more discrete about what I was doing.

And then it all changed. One night while I was at a bar, I met a man. He was older than I was, but he was very rich. His watch, his clothes, his jewelry all told me that. He was short and kind of chunky. He wasn't my type at all, but he was also very confident, and that worked it's magic on me. I woke up in his bed. It was the first time I had ever spent an entire night in any man's bed since Ted.

If Mickey's dick was huge, Dan's was tiny. He didn't come close to satisfying my needs. But as I looked around his place, I realized that it was where I wanted to be. But I had a huge problem. Dan already had a teenaged daughter and there was no room in his life for anymore kids.

I had an idea in mind, but no way to broach the subject. Dan asked me to go to Vegas with him for two weeks. He had business to conduct there. I knew that if I didn't go, our relationship would be over. And what about after Vegas? I didn't love Dan. My feelings for him had nothing to do with love and more to do with security and the type of living situation that I thought I deserved.

I called Samantha.

"Is something wrong with TJ?" she asked. I smiled. She had never even asked how I was or said hello. Her only concern was for my baby.

"Sam, can you come over?" I asked. "We need to talk."

When she got there, I was amazed at how quickly she must have driven. She looked around the apartment, and her eyes locked onto my sleeping child. He was almost two years old by then and growing like crabgrass.

Once she'd made sure he was okay, she turned to me. I noticed then that Samantha was afraid. Her giant bosom was heaving as if she'd just sprinted a hundred yards.

"Elaine, you're not taking Mickey's visitation rights away are you?" she asked. "Look if it's about money, we can probably pay you a little bit more but ..."

"Sam, stop," I said. And she did. She shut up as easily as if I had flipped a switch. I had her completely at my mercy.

"Samantha, I've met someone," I said. "And we'll probably be doing a lot of traveling." Before I could finish what I was saying she was crying her eyes out.

"Sam, stop," I said again. "TJ has a huge problem." Her eyes snapped open instantly as if she was a mother bear defending her cub.

"I thought you said that there was nothing wrong with him," she snapped. Before I could even figure out what to say she had crossed the room and stood over him. She watched the rise and fall of his chest for signs of injury or illness.

"Sam come here," I said. "We have to talk."

"What's wrong with him?" she asked. "What's wrong with my baby?"

"Samantha, he has the wrong mother," I said. "You have to understand. I never wanted him. I only wanted him when I thought I could use him to keep Ted and I together. When that didn't happen, I began to resent him. I blamed him for keeping me from getting back with Ted. And Sam, you and I both know that Mickey doesn't give a fuck about him either.

I don't blame him. It has to be awful having your child named after another man. Especially when that man is your former best friend who fucked your wife for months on end.

The only person who really loves TJ is you, Sam. So I'm doing the best thing for both of us ... For all of us ... If it's what you want?"

"What are you talking about?" she asked. I showed her the papers my lawyer had drawn up. I was signing over my parental rights to her. I had done it that way, because in the event that she and Mickey ever got divorced, I wanted TJ with her.

"If you sign this, he's yours for life," I said. "I can't come back and take him at a later date. And Mickey will no longer have to pay child support."

She snatched the papers out of my hand and signed them. Then she hugged me and grabbed TJ. That was four years ago, and I haven't seen either of them since.

Samantha truly was a better woman than I ever gave her credit for. Over the years, she actually fostered and maintained a relationship between TJ and my parents, to keep him in their lives.

I did well for myself. Dan and I had been living together for the last three years. He had moved me in with him, so I could provide a female parent figure for a rambunctious teenaged daughter. I guess I was also his live-in girlfriend or whore depending on how you looked at it.

At any rate, he'd also failed in his intentions. His daughter Candace hated me with a passion. She'd been seventeen when we first met and now at the ripe old age of twenty-one, she hated my guts even more. And I could not care less about her. I actually didn't really care about anything outside of making sure that I maintained my standard of living.

At thirty-three years old to Dan's fifty, I was sitting in the cat - bird seat, or so I thought. I drove a Lexus and had all the money I needed. Dan made far more money than Ted ever did. At least, that was what I told myself.

The truth was that I would have run out of the house naked and left everything behind to be with Ted again. Ted was still the only man I had ever loved. I just used the rest of them. I used Mickey for his dick back then. And I was using Dan for his money.

My life was good except for two things. The first was that Dan controlled every penny in the household. It all depended on his moods. If he was on top of a deal and feeling good, the money flowed like water. On the other hand, when things in his business weren't going well, Dan could be pretty fuckin' cheap.

For the last few years, I didn't need to work at all. I lived in a big ... Almost too big house and had everything I needed. But in exchange for this, I'd had to become pretty much a slave. While it was true that we had a maid to take care of the actual cooking and cleaning, my life still was not optimal. I had to do whatever it took to keep Dan and Candace happy; that usually meant looking the other way for whatever rule Candace was breaking. And it meant that I had to be available and put on a superior acting performance whenever Dan wanted to stick his tiny dick in me. The hardest part of that was pretending I actually felt it.

My life was hell. Sure I had all of the things that should have made me happy, but that was because I had given up everything for it, and I had begun to realize that maybe it wasn't worth it. I gave up my freedom. I had even given up my child. But more than anything else I gave up love.

I still loved Ted more than anything else on the planet. I had just put that love on hold until I thought enough time had passed when he might be able to get past what we'd done. I knew a lot of divorced men. Most of them were desperate, haggard, vampire like creatures, who looked at a woman like a starving wolf looks at a steak.

I figured enough time had passed for Ted and I to meet again. The problem was that I had no way of getting in touch with him. I also had no idea of how things were going in his life.

For all I knew Ted could have lost his job and been homeless. I was always hearing about the car companies laying off engineers. I needed to find out how Ted was doing.

I still thought about him every day. I remembered everything about our time together. I remember his shyness when we first met. I remembered the first time he told me that he loved me. I remembered the first time we made love. I remembered our wedding, our honeymoon, and too many good times to even count.

But most of all my body remembered that Ted, and I were supposed to make a house full of kids together and in my mid thirties, my time for being able to have more than one or two more was dwindling rapidly.

"We need to have a talk," Candace said to me one day. I was surprised because we hardly ever spoke to each other. When I first moved in Candace had made it very clear to me that she was the lady of the house, while I was just another of her dad's floozies.

I think that Dan and I both thought that she would come around in time, but it had simply never happened. After a while, we had settled into a sort of detente, where I basically kissed her ass. I looked the other way through all of her young adult shenanigans, chauffeured her around when her car was in the shop or after she had wrecked one, and signed whatever she needed me to sign for school or the court system. But we still never spoke. Believe me I had tried.

There were times when I just gave her a cheerful, "Good morning Candace," as she came down to breakfast or whatever she called what she did in the morning. She never bothered to answer me, not even once accidentally.

She would always march straight to her father, hug him, and wish him the most lovingly cheerful greetings ever uttered by any human being, while totally ignoring my presence.

That had continued for years. She had never backed off on her vehemence. Through holidays, and birthdays and vacations, she persevered. If she went out and needed a ride home she'd have one of her friends call me and tell me they needed a ride. Even when I picked them up, her friends would all express gratitude or tell me how much fun they had. Candace never spoke to me. She treated me like a servant or a piece of furniture. It was as if I was just there.

So when she came in and started talking to me, my surprise outweighed my brain too much for me even to understand her words.

"Are ... Are ... Are you talking to me?" I asked, in shock.

"Elaine, you and I are the only people in the room," she said. I looked at her to make sure she was okay.

"Look, my new car is being modded, so I need a ride to work," she said. "We can talk on the way there."

"You ... Have a job?" I sputtered. I began to question my sanity.

"Not the job I want," she said. "But I'm working on it. However, we need to talk about you Elaine. I'm trying to warn you."

"Warn me about what?" I asked.

"Elaine, I've hated you from the first second I saw you," she said. "But you still stuck in there and as my dad's whores go, you weren't bad. You, believe it or nor are the closest thing to a mother that I've ever had. But you're a dumb ass.""

"I ... I ..." I sputtered.

"Elaine, trust me," she said. "You're a dumb ass. Do you even know what my father does for a living?"

"Yes I do," I said. "He's a business man."

"What business," she asked. I drew a blank.

"See," she said. "Dumb ass. My Daddy is the biggest porn producer on the east coast. All of his movies are shot in Vegas like all the rest, but his corporate headquarters are in New Jersey. That's why he always travels to Jersey or Vegas at least two or three times a month. It's also why we live here in the middle where no one knows us, so no church groups or women's groups picket our house." We were talking as we walked towards my car.

"We need to start squirreling away money for you Elaine," she said. "Here," she said as she handed me a check. I looked at it, and it was for five thousand dollars. It was made out to cash.

"That's supposed to be going for my supercharger install and the suspension mods on my new car," she said.

"I don't understand any of this," I said. "Can you slow down and explain it to me?"

"Drive the car Elaine," she said. "I can't be late." This was a change from the girl who showed up whenever she chose to and completely ignored her curfews.

"Elaine, I never met my mother," she began. "She was one of my father's early successes in porn. My dad was screwing the woman that every knuckle-dragging slob who ever jacked off to a porno tape was in love with. In fact, my mom had that extremely hot girl next door look that all men loved and every woman tired to copy. Everyone loved her ... except my dad. He had her making three or four movies a week, no matter what. When she was pregnant with me, she made prego movies. He found a way to keep her working non-stop.

The problem was that my mom was stupid, like you. You see she loved him that was why she did it. The woman did everything she could for his approval. The only way for her to reconcile what she did for a living with the way she felt about him was to do drugs. Over the years, it took more and more of them to keep her working.

My mom built my dad's porn empire on her back. My dad got more and more women making his films. They all wanted the chance to be as successful as my mom was. And every year younger and prettier women came along. Some of them so desperate that they would do anything ... on screen or off for a chance.

After a while, mom's drug problem became a really big problem. Her ODs became common knowledge. And daddy had a lot more women working for him. And most of them by that time WERE younger and prettier. However, daddy couldn't just dump her. He HAD married her. So if he dumped her, not only would the entire porn industry look at him as being a jerk for abandoning the woman who made him rich, but he'd have to give her half of everything in any divorce.

So daddy did the only thing he could. He gave her the two things she wanted most. He gave her a lot fewer movies to make, because by then no one wanted to see her anymore anyway. And he gave her a lot more drugs. She died of a massive overdose before I was even two years old. She barely ever even held me. I was cuddled and taken care of by a series of nannies from the time I was born.

That's one of the reasons I have trouble forming attachments with people to this day. For most of my life, people have been PAID to look after me, so I question everyone's motives about everything.

After my mom died there've been lots of women most, only last a few weeks or a month at best. That's why I didn't want to waste the time or the effort getting to know you. Let's face it Elaine; you're an okay looking woman, but in my dad's world, you're as plain as grass.

I'm not sure you've ever thought about this, but my daddy has a problem. The porn industry is not nearly as successful as it once was. In the 90s and the first decade of the 21st century, they were basically printing money. The average guy instead of having to bear the embarrassment of being seen going into a porno store could simply order his movies online or just download them. Business was booming. The problem was that every girl in Iowa suddenly thought about moving to Vegas and becoming a porn star. Overnight there were so many blond stripper types with huge boobs that you couldn't tell them apart anymore.

That led to diversification. Suddenly, guys wanted more average looking women. They wanted chunky women. They wanted fat women. They wanted skinny women. They wanted older women. Nowadays, women use web cams out of their homes and build huge fan bases. And it's worse, with the internet so prevalent and sharing sites everywhere. Some guy in Idaho buys a video. He shares the video or just the best scenes from it online and it goes all over the net on forty or fifty other sharing sites. That means that within a week, every guy out there who collects porn has a copy of it for free. That drives the price way down and suddenly the industry is in trouble.

The very same technology that brought porn out of the darkness and made it normal, if not respectable, is choking the life out of it. My dad has been looking to move into other businesses.

He has a friend with connections in the auto industry. His friend was looking to branch out into one of those automotive boutiques. You know the places where you can go and get your car customized for performance or luxury or just shits and giggles?

Well, his friend had an engineer in mind to design and handle the modifications; he had a couple of certified mechanics to actually do all the work, and he was going to provide management. My dad was going to buy in as a partner and provide the bulk of the start-up capital. It should have been a good deal, even with the amount of money they wanted for him to buy in. I mean dad is bleeding money with the porn business. Every year his expenses go up and his profits go down. The amount of the buy in was far less than it costs dad to finance a couple of movies, and it had the potential to become a cash cow, maybe even something dad could go into and phase out the porn business entirely.

The problem was that a couple of the guys balked at accepting dad as a partner once they found out where the money came from. They eventually got conventional financing from venture capitalists. They're doing well. Anyway, that's the business I want to get into.

One of my boyfriends taught me how to do repairs on cars, and I've had my head under the hood of a car ever since. The guys who started the auto shop have no idea that I'm related to my dad. They just see me as a kid who wants to work for them. I'm getting an in with one of them by babysitting his two adorable kids.

I figure that if he trusts me with his kids, he'll know he can trust me with his customers' cars."

I was shocked. First, I was shocked that Candace was anything other than another spoiled princess. Her ability to understand the nature of her father's industry and what was bringing it down amazed me. She sounded more like a business historian than a twenty-one-year old girl.

I drove the car where she directed, and we were heading into an area that I had never been to. The houses here while not as large as the houses in our area were newer, more stylish, and definitely more modern. It was a very upscale area. We passed through a huge gate with guards on duty. Even our area didn't have that.

"So why were you worried about me?" I asked. "Why did you give me the money?"

"Because you're in danger, Elaine," she spat as if I was supposed to understand that already.

"How am I in danger?" I asked.

"Because daddy has found your replacement," she said. "Or rather she found him."

"Whah," I said. I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach.

"Her name is Kitty McGreedy," she said. "That's her real fuckin' name too. Can you imagine what that must've been like when she was growing up? You know how in school they call your last name first. Can you see her answering to McGreedy, Kitty?"

I laughed. "It's not fuckin' funny," she spat. "It's a fuckin' joke. It's more than that, it's an insult. She's made three movies for my dad and has set her eyes on not only taking over the top spot on his roster of porn actresses but your spot in his bed."

I was really shocked then.

"This bitch has studied porn like it was a class in school. She knows all of the old porn stars and what they specialized in. She can emulate the techniques that any of them used for blow jobs. She can mimic the hip movements and styles of any actress you name. She has also studied sex the way a God damned doctor studies anatomy. She can fake an orgasm better than you can, Elaine. She's not just a hoe; she's a hoe-fessional. As badly as I hate you. I hate HER, worse."

Even as she said it, her revulsion for the woman leaked out of her like 10w40 from a cracked oil pan.

"At least you're genuine," she said. "Your hair is real and at least close to your natural color. Those little boobs of yours are real, and you haven't had any lipo. You even have that delicate little tattoo near your ankle.

This bitch is so fake; she's like one of those 3-d cartoons. Her hair is naturally red, but she bleaches it just to die it a paler shade of red. Her hair is barely shoulder length, but she has long hair extensions that make her hair come down to her ass. She spends at least an hour a day in a tanning booth. Her eyes are green. She wears blue contacts. She's had collagen injected into her lips to make them fuller. More full my ass; the bitch had no lips at all in her first movie. They built those fuckin' lips to make her blow jobs seem hotter.